"Pride gets a lot of people in trouble." - Harrisburg resident Gary Williams

STEELTON – Gary Williams’ mantra is scrawled across his collarbone:

“Love matters more than pride.”

Williams commissioned the green script two years ago, marking a decade since the birth of this first child and his decision to cut ties with the street life that almost killed him.

View full sizeSupporters of the Stop the Violence Rally play chess in the shade Saturday. The rally included a fish fry, music and a flea market to help spread their message of peace.
Jessica Tezak, PennLive

“I live that,” Williams said Saturday of the tattoo after sharing his story at the Stop the Violence ministry’s Rally for Peace.

Potential benefits of events like the one held Saturday include establishing social networks organizers hope help counteract the complex factors in which community violence is rooted.

In other words, little can be done in an afternoon to combat the allure of the quick cash to teenagers exposed to the drug trade - $1,000 a day when Williams was a teen.

But resorting to violence to "be on top", as Williams put it, that's a lot lot harder to do when you know the other person. It's not as easy to, say, shoot someone whom you know, and probably like, and maybe has ties to your friends or relatives.

Positive peer pressure also can discourage lapses in constructive habits, particularly where they’re newly formed and modeled after those who’ve made similar changes.

Sometimes, hearing or experiencing the dire consequences of that life is enough to scare kids out of acting on their temptations.

Williams, now 35, claims that worked in his case.

He watched his uncle die of a cocaine and heroin overdose. His older brother and cousins served long prison terms for drug dealing and related charges.

Seeing that kept him from dealing drugs himself. Still, the lifestyle intrigued him. Curiosity aside, much of his “wrong crowd” consisted of his childhood friends, he said.

"You want to do the right thing and not hang out with them, but they're your friends. And you need them. You can't just be alone, or you get picked on," Williams said. "We did other things, besides bad things, together. We played basketball, we did a lot of things. But we got into trouble, too."

Including leading police on a high-speed chase in a stolen car.

Williams went away, missing his high school prom and graduation - which remain huge regrets for him now.

Two months after his release, he was shot in the back while walking to his grandmother's house on Regina Avenue.

"It was a drive-by. I didn't even see who it was," he said.

Williams spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from punctured lungs, bruised ribs and other internal injuries

But it took another five years – and the birth of his first child – for him to get it.

"I didn't retaliate, but I was still getting into some trouble. And I started carrying a gun because I was scared," he said. "I'm a better person now. I have a wife and kids - that helped. I have a job now."

Williams credits family support with his ability to stay on a stable, straight path. That family includes Rev. Mim Harvey, who founded Stop the Violence one year before her nephew was shot.

"He was one of our early clients," Harvey said.

The organization with was critical, too, in pairing Williams with his like-minded neighbors and offering alternatives – jobs, sports, etc. – to his old ways, hence his continued involvement with Stop the Violence, he said.

Not much has changed about his South Allison Hill neighborhood since his youth, he said.

An overwhelming majority of its residents are attempting to live relatively quiet, respectable lives, Harvey said.

Even if the notoriety truly is the creation of just "a few", Harvey said, it's no less deserved.

Williams and Harvey said it remains easy - in the right company - to get “anything you want” there – particularly if it’s drugs or unregistered guns you’re after.

Based on the stories behinds the majority of this year's 11 homicides, the access creates an opportunity for some residents of the Harrisburg area to act on their seeming willingness to take a life for money, simplifying a love triangle – whatever it might be that’s starving their ego.

Williams, whose skin is scarred where the bullet exited his body 17 years ago, says he's on the sidelines for good. But he's acutely aware of what continues to happen in his hometown.

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